Get Your FREE eBook!

Recent Posts

“Facebook advertising for artists?! But I tried that and it didn’t work!”

W e all know that we should be on Facebook, but FB can be bewildering.

Our customers are there, but almost everything we’ve been told about Facebook has been a Siren’s song, hasn’t it?

Our posts don’t get shared as much as we were lead to believe.

Even if we get a good following, they rarely buy.

Spending money on a “boost post” was a complete waste…

And the rules keep changing!

Facebook advertising is the LAST thing you want to do if you’re uninitiated.

But with a little bit of direction, Facebook marketing can be a complete gamer-changer!

Justin Brooke is a personal friend of mine and is one of today’s elite media buyers; he’s spent over $10,000,000 on advertising online, both for himself, and for some very big clients.

He’s the expert that other experts turn to, and that includes me!

On this call, Justin and I talk about:

Why artists should be running Facebook ads

What can Facebook advertising do for artists?

How Facebook marketing compares to more traditional media

What makes a campaign flop?

What makes a campaign successful?

Why the “Boost Post” feature ISN’T the best way to advertise

Specific strategies that consistently produce winning results!

Click the video below and explore the possibilities!

(sorry about the crappy audio!)

Transcript

Owen Hello, beautiful people! I’m really happy to be introducing a friend of mine; Justin Brooke, and if you don’t know Justin Brooke you’re in for a big treat. I’ve known Justin now for five years maybe plus or minus, and he is the man when it comes to media buying.

Specifically, for our purposes, he is one of the upper echelon, is one of the top 1% of 1% of guys who understand Facebook marketing. And I wanted to do a call because I get asked about this all the time. And I can get through it; I have good ads running profitably, but these things change all the time. And when it comes to Facebook ads, as far as I’m concerned, Justin is the one and only guy that should come and talk to us about it so, hey buddy how’ve you been?

Justin I’m good, Man, thank you for the raving introduction; I hope I can live up to it!

Owen So let’s just jump right is so, if an artist is watching me, or in the discussion will ask, they’ll say “So why should I, as an artist, why should I care about Facebook ads. Facebook is free, isn’t it?”

Justin (chuckles) Yeah in a sense it’s free if your moral and ethical thermometer was a little bit different, then you could just spam everybody on Facebook. Technically you can just reach out to anybody you want on Facebook for free. Chances are you’ll probably get your account shut down before the day is over, but that is the benefit of Facebook ads: If you want to reach anybody you can, you’ve just got to grease Mark Zuckerberg’s palms a little bit! You don’t have to spend a lot; $5 a day that’s great.

Owen Well, that’s right because everybody has surely realized that at this part of the game is that your audience/reach is not what it used to be is it?

Justin No.

Owen It used to be if you put something on Facebook and you would get a zillion likes and shares and everything, and if you do it now, you look and see that you got 1000 friends, and 50 people saw this! What’s going on?

Justin Yeah, that is common. You know it’s also still possible – it’s just a lot harder now to get something to reach all of your fans ideally more than your fans in social media, you’re hoping that it’s going to go out beyond just people that you know and that they follow you. You’re hoping that it will go viral. And it’s possible, but it’s not very reliable.

But what is reliable is, throw five dollars into the machine, and you can reach an extra 1000 people a day.

Owen Right and that’s not nothing. It’s funny because a lot of people are like “Oh Facebook it’s like social media = millions!” and then you hear a 1000, and it’s like 🙁 but that’s like 30,000 a month!

Justin Right!

Owen When was the last time you were at an art show pro and had an engagement with 30,000 people? You didn’t.

Justin (laughs) Yeah, they’re probably not just getting 30,000 people whenever you want.

Owen Yeah exactly, so give us an overview of how Facebook advertising works, because everybody has seen the “boost post” thing if they have a business account they can see the “boost post,” and that doesn’t work that great. We can talk about that too but, that’s NOT what we mean by Facebook marketing, so: like, advertising on Facebook can you give our folks just an overview? How does it work, what is it do, and what CAN you do with it?

Justin Yeah, the one thing that I wanted to address was that it doesn’t have to be $5; I’m just saying that that is a very worthy entry point for somebody. But if you wanted to spend $100 a day you can reach 20,000 people. If you wanted to spend a $1000 a day or $10,000 a day, it’s whatever you’re comfortable with. Facebook doesn’t have the scale that Google has, meaning that Facebook taps out around $10,000 a day unless you’re a big brand where Google can keep going but I don’t think most artists are going to need that level of volume that would be millions of people per day.

So what is Facebook advertising? It just allows you to extend your reach on the Facebook platform. You can do just about everything that you could do as a normal user on the platform. You know you make a post, that has a link or a picture or a video, just about everything you normally do, but you pay a little bit and you can extend your reach.

The “boost post” is not the best way to do things; it’s gotten a lot better over the years. The used to be if you kind of press a button and put some money in and hope it goes to the right people, and it’s kind of a lottery thing where now you can actually have some control over what audience it goes out to or not.

Justin It’s far from optimal. You’re going to pay more than most people. You’re going to get – it happens like a convenience store. You know if you go to the convenience store and buy your gallon of milk, sure it’s right around the corner, but You’re going to pay extra for that. And that’s exactly what you get when you deal with a boost post; you’re paying more than you need to pay for that ease.

And if you go through the actual platform, you’ll have a lot more options, a lot more flexibility and you will pay less.

Owen That’s the number one thing I hear, “Facebook? I don’t want to advertise on Facebook! I did a boost post. I put $25 in it, and I didn’t get nothing!”

And there is a whole lot of things wrong with advertising on Facebook that way, but I would not be surprised if a great majority of our artists don’t know there is a whole thing at the back of it. Obviously, they are seeing a lot of ads from Big Dumb Companies and thinking, “That’s not us, we couldn’t do that.”

Yes, you can, yes you can advertise like any of those big companies!

Justin If you just take a little time to learn, first off all where do you go to access the ads manager and it takes you about 20 minutes to familiarize yourself with the layouts of the ads manager interface. What does this button do, and what does that button do? Now if you take an afternoon to invest into learning Facebook ads, it will pay for itself over and over and over again because the amount of targeting you can do, you can reach out to people within 25 miles of your zip code who like a certain audience or who watch a certain TV show. I mean there is so many different targeting options that you get, and that’s the power of Facebook. That’s why it’s so popular is because they change the advertising game in how much targeting options there are.

It used to be you could just target your ads based on, like, where you are and approximately how old you were, gender; that’s a very basic targeting, but Facebook made so you could target down to almost what color shirt they are wearing that day.

But they can’t yet…

Owen It’s coming! (laughs)

Justin But it gets pretty scary how much you can target on Facebook.

Owen Yeah, that’s kind of what I say too. Whatever audience you have, you can find. So a very common “for instance” would be, say you do baby portraits or pet portraits, you can tackle pet owners; you can tackle what kind of pet. You can tackle them by zip code or certain areas around the world you don’t have to go locally.

Justin There actually is a setting inside Facebook where you can target new parents.

Owen Is that right? Will there you go. I didn’t even know that.

Justin You can target people who are traveling, so you can say “I want to target people who are traveling”, and they put your targeting settings to people in Maui, you know, and then you can sell art about Maui to people who are traveling in Maui.” That’s just one little example, but you can do so many different things like that.

Owen So let’s say you have a show in the city that’s, okay, so I’m right by Jasper. Ok, so that’s a big tourist place, and if I was having a show there, you could target people who are going to Jasper, or are traveling through Jasper, and you can advertise to them and say “Hey come check this out, and drink my booze” or whatever you do at your show, yeah that’s cool.

This cool, a little bit of thinking goes a long, long way.

Justin What I would do, not to be too advanced, but the way I would do it is this: if you were having a show, for like a week or two weeks before that show, I would serve video’s to them of like you doing the painting – not the whole thing – you don’t want to reveal the whole thing, get them involved in the process and let them know at the end of those videos, and really “Come and see the whole show” and that would just get them all teased and wanting to see it.

Owen For sure, for sure…

Justin And that’s the type of stuff that the major brands were doing on TV, but now you can do it with a $10 a day budget.

Owen Yeah exactly. Unlike any other type of advertising, you can talk to people who will resonate with your message, more effectively than any other time in history, save door to door sales. And who wants to do that? If you take out a newspaper ad, or flyers or any of that old school – like a magazine, a lot of artists will say “Well I’m saving the money to advertise in this magazine, and it’s $1000″. To which I’m saying “Please, just don’t!”

Justin Yeah.

Owen So let’s say you’re having an art show, and you decide to put an ad in the paper. Is that the worst thing in the world to do? No, but it’s far from the most targeted because you’re paying for ads to people that are just aren’t into that. You’re talking to people that aren’t qualified. And that where I think Facebook shines.

Who IS interested in artwork,

Boom.

And the more drilled down you can be the better so, you want to talk to dog owners, or you want to talk to new parents, anything, people that love abstract, or whatever it is, they’re there, and you can talk to just to them. I’m here to tell you that that’s a huge, huge revelation, a complete game changer, so you’re not wasting any money.

And for $5 or $10 you can talk to exactly the people that you should be speaking to.

Justin It used to be the argument against Facebook ads was “I don’t think my people are on Facebook.” Now, that’s not an argument anymore, I mean there are 1.7 billion people on Facebook, and more coming on every single day.

If you were going to advertise in a magazine or newspaper, you could just target people who like that magazine, and that newspaper right on Facebook!

Anybody who you could target with any other type of media, you can target on Facebook.

Facebook is pretty much everybody. Not “everybody” but a major portion of the population has a Facebook account.

Owen Sure and the speed what you can test, like back in the olden times, if you wanted to get advanced, and run what’s called a split test. Essentially a split test is “What’s going to work?” Does this work, which is better, this one? I don’t know, let’s run them both and see which one does the best.

Well if you’re going to go even in the newspaper, it takes time. I’m sure it’s been shortened this somewhat, but back when I was advertising in magazines you had a four-month lead, so it was Christmas in August because it just took forever.

And now it’s not.

It’s very, very quick, so sometimes within an hour your ad is approved and in front of people, for your $5.

Justin I remember the first time I did a print ad. “Alright I got this digital thing down and let me expand my horizon out to print,” and then I created an ad, and like most cases, the ad didn’t work at first.

But then I realized with the print ad there is no like, “Okay, pause let me make a quick change” and then do that again, that’s what I was used to because I grew up with digital ads. That’s what I started on, and when things didn’t work right away, I was just like, “Wow I can’t just hit pause, make a change, and try again.” I’ve got to wait for this thing to run full circle. I’ve got to order the signs again, I’m going to put them out there again, it was horrible.

Right then and there I was like “You know what? I understand that there is an opportunity in print, but I’m going to stick to digital because I can quickly, I can test for $5. If it’s working ok great, let’s spend $100 or let’s spend $1000, or let’s spend $100, oh it’s not working then pause and try again tomorrow.”

Owen Well in the last 24 hours I spent $70 on Facebook ads, and we did over $600 in sales, on $70. You’re not going to get that in print. You know, and we are doing a lot of right things. I’m in no way an expert, but you do this, and you try that, and you let it go for a bit. Let’s try that, okay, oh that works better. And you do something else, and if it doesn’t work: go back. And you can do all this in a very very short window.

I mean you shouldn’t tinker with it constantly; I probably tinkered with it too much, because sometimes it takes a little while, but I don’t know what I could have spent that $70 on, to bring in $600.

Justin And that is not an uncommon story. I’m sure there is somebody that is listening and thinking “Well that’s just because you’re an expert”. You know I’ve 2000 people on my platform where we teach this stuff, and I hear those things over and over again. People are spending a $100 and making $900, or somebody who spent $650 and made $9000.

I hear these stories – literally – every day I hear these stories.

Owen I can understand people are “cocking an eyebrow” because they tried it and it didn’t work, or they know a guy who spent $100 and lost his shirt.

Well, it’s because they ran off half cocked, and they’re just going to start throwing money around without like, sit down for a little bit here…

Justin Because I get to see so many people are on the platform, I’ve seen both sides, and what they do differently. When this guy does this, he becomes successful, and this guy does this, he always becomes unsuccessful.

And like I can see right from the beginning, I know within ten days of somebody coming onto our platform, whether this person is going to be successful or not.

And that’s great for us because we can then deploy customers support resources to them to get them back on the right track. But for anybody else that is listening right now, if you’re doing this, stop and let me help you get on the right track!

So here’s what the person messes up always does:

First of all, they think like a lottery. It’s like “Ok well I’ve got $100, or I’ve got $500”, whatever the amount of money is, they’re like “Ok I’m going to try out this Facebook thing.”

So they’ve got this one page, usually the home page of their website, it’s not even like a dedicated sales page which it should be.

So “Oh I got a $100 and I’ve got a home page for my website”.

“Let me put in a $100 into this machine, crack down the arm, see if I make some money”.

That guy always loses his money. Every single time.

I call the Traffic Hail Mary. It’s like he is going to throw that money out there and hopes it comes back to you. What ends up happening is you throw it out there, and it just lands in the trash bucket, that’s it.

So the way you want to be doing it correctly, we call it the 5x3 method.

You want to set up 5 ad groups, three ad sets in each. That doesn’t mean you’re creating 15 ads, it’s the same three ads in each of the five ad groups, that way you’re testing all five different ad groups.

What do I mean by ad groups?

I mean like maybe one of them you’re testing, people that are locals.

Maybe another one is people that are traveling to your area.

Another one is people who like one of your competitors.

Another ad group is people who like certain books or TV shows that are relevant.

So for me, it’s usually I target one ad group, you know people who like celebrities that are relevant to my market.

People who like my competitors, and people who like media which are relevant: magazines, TV shows, blogs, anything that’s relevant to the market.

So that’s like my standard five ad groups. And then each of those ad groups we try three different ads.

When I say different, I don’t mean you have “the” at the beginning and no “the” at the beginning, I mean different ads.

In the beginning, trying to find wildly different variations so you can figure out what they respond to.

Alright and then by chance you could have two pages, you know that you’re driving traffic to, even better but if you’ve got one, hopefully it’s like you made that page for this campaign, not just your default home page. That guy is almost always going to be successful.

So what you do is take whatever budget you have, I’m going to talk about $500. People can split it up however you want, you know you could raise it, lower it.

So if I had $500, I’m not just going to put $500 in the machine, even with the 5x3 format and hope that things are going to win.

What I’m going to do is if I have $500, I will put a $100 in with the 5x3. Then I’m going to wait because three of those five are probably going to bomb, so you’re going to be left with 2 ad groups that got you a good result. Inside those 2 ad groups, you still have three ads inside of each of them.

One of those ads is going to be the one that got the most action.

So now you’re down to two ad groups with one ad. Then you put in another $100 on that. It’s like betting on horses.

At first, I’m going to bet on all the horses. I’m going to see which ones are winners. Then I’m just going to take all my money and bet on those winners.

Owen You cut out all the deadbeats.

Justin Yeah, you cut out all the deadbeats and that’s how you do online advertising.

And if you think that way and by proceeding that way; just constantly repeating that cycle, those are the people who are going to be phenomenally successful

But I am split testing a landing page. What does that mean? It means you make the two pages, and I don’t want to lose anybody, but there’re two schools in marketing.

One is the “long form sales letter” so to speak where you put lots of information, and you tell your whole story. You don’t hold anything back – it’s like the old W5: who, what, where, when and why. The whole Magilla is right there. Everything you could possibly need to know to make a decision.

And then there’s like the “Got Milk” headline right. Here it is, take it!”

Everybody thinks the short copy will win, because nobody is going to read all of that long copy anymore.

And even if that’s true there is something else because I am split testing this, and the short copy is getting half the results of the full, long form. And I knew that, but I tested the short one anyway. Yeah, it’s not working at all.

Owen I’ve been a long form guy since the beginning, but I wanted to test something, well let’s see if my mother in law is right. And no, she’s not.

Again. (laughs from both)

Coming up with the different ads, that might sound a little like “Oh, that’s a lot of work,” but it’s not, you can clone and then change right?

Justin It sounds a lot more fancy than what it is. What I find is most people are very intimidated at first because it’s all new words. “What’re ad sets and tracking pixels?!” and I get it. Whenever something is new, we’re all a little “Ew, I don’t wanna touch that!”

But I promise you there is nothing you can break, and it’s very simple. You just got to invest a couple of hours; you just got to watch a video, what does that button do?

Owen Just because it’s new doesn’t mean it’s difficult. It’s just new, right? Pumping gas can be intimidating if you’ve never filled your car with gas or something.

And the second one is to do is “Get someone to show you what to do.

So I’m excited about this. Justin’s got a brand new course; I’m taking it, I’m listening to that 5x3, and I’m like kicking myself and thinking “Holy cow what would my ROI be…” (Return On Investment – a term referring to how many dollars you get back from every dollar your spend). Because I’m running one ad to one group of people, and I know better.

So I’m getting this course, and I wanted everybody to know about it. So talk about your brand new course, this is exciting stuff.

Justin Yeah so we’ve got a course called Bulletproof FB ads, and it’s actually not a new course. We’ve had it for years.

We’ve just updated it for 2017 and so we’re covering all the latest things inside there.

The basics, absolutely are covered, when you watch the videos it will be the latest version of the interface, that way you’re not hearing things and like “Wait but where’s the button?! I thought you said it’s over here, and it’s not there. You said it was a red button, but it’s a green button…”

No, all of our videos are freshly updated with the new interface and all the latest changes and all that’s on Facebook.

And we teach you the 5x3 method; we show you what good ads look like, what bad ads look like, and we take you from rank beginner to “Okay, I’ve got an ad live! Let’s get this going!”

And then we show you a couple of advanced tips to make sure you’re well on your way and not just “Okay I’ve got an ad…now what?”

We take you past that “now what”.

Owen Now in my mind it’s like this: having been around the block a few times, you see how easy it is to get a hole in your bucket, and money is just pouring out of the thing.

So I’ve always been in favor of spending a little bit of money, so I can find out from the guys who know more than I do and learn from their mistakes, guys who have been doing this – whatever it is – longer than I have and they know better.

The FIRST thing I ask is “Is there a course?” and if so, I take it, because whatever you spend on education, you save in the School of Hard Knocks, because you’re not wasting money reinventing the wheel.

And even if you’re just learning where the potholes are, that alone is invaluable.

Justin Just the section on “bad ads,” really, is worth the money.

Owen And you said you had a coupon for our people to come and introduce themselves and come and say hi with your course?

Justin Yeah absolutely. I think we agreed on 20%?

Owen Yup! Wherever this video is, we’ll put a link with the coupon code so; you need to put the code in to get the discount. That’s how this works.

Very cool! I’m going to be the first guy through the gates; I can’t wait.

Here’s the thing; there are lots of ways to learn. In this day and age, though, things change a lot. Facebook is not the same as when we all got on it.

It changes all the time, and I was surprised at how much things changed in the year from when I ran my first ads, to now.

I would have liked to have a resource because you know what?

The book that I have – which is a great book, and I know the guy that wrote it – the day the book came out, Facebook changed everything.

Justin Yeah and that sometimes happens with our courses.

We recently came out with a Google course, and they made changes a week after we launched the course, but every month we go back through our courses, and we every week make new videos to keep everything up to date because that’s our promise on our home page. “The most updated online advertising courses.”

That’s our big thing.

Owen That’s awesome, and I’ve wanted to do something like this for a long time, and when the new version of the course came out, “Hey Buddy – I’ve got some folks that want to meet you!”

Click the link and the coupon code whether it’s above, or below, or the description this wherever you see this and go check out Justin’s’ course.

I’m here to tell you that you’re going to save a fortune, over stumbling around and trying to figure it out yourself.

And personally, there is nobody else I would rather learn from.

So if you want to run ads like I do, go to the guy that’s showing me too.

Ok so thanks, everybody, thank you, Justin, I really appreciate the time you spent with us and is there anything you want to say just heading out?

Justin Thank you guys for having me on, and step your way up, use the coupon code, and grab our Facebook course!

3 Comments

Owen, I’m just a little guy operating a studio/gallery out of my house. I do all of it: make the art, reproduce the art, take the orders (such as I get,) ship any orders, educate myself. This course sounds like something designed for big, successful businesses. Is it doable for small one-man operations like mine?